Bella Starling
by rocklad
Summary: Clarice administers the MMPI to her five-year-old daughter and is disturbed by what she learns.


**BELLA STARLING **

**By Matt Mintz **

**An unauthorized short story**

**using characters created by Thomas Harris**

BE SURE TO TRY YOUR HAND AT THE TRIVIA

QUESTIONS AFTER YOU READ THE STORY!

CHAPTER 1

Clarice Starling ran her finger along the glossy picture of _Judith Beheading Holofernes_, tracing the line of his arterial spray. The _International Artist_ article was about the many versions of the scene, from Donatello to Botticelli. Starling wasn't alone in preferring Caravaggio's. His photographic realism-especially of facial expressions—was gripping enough to make the moment's biblical context irrelevant.

Like any good mother, though, Clarice notices her daughter's silences.

"Hey, Bella! How you doing?" she called out in a tone meant to carry through their house of wood and spaces.

Bella didn't reply so Clarice slapped her _International Artist_ down on a stack of magazines, all waiting to be the next one read. In America, even the inanimate are locked in competition.

She crossed the living room in her quiet, comfortable shoes, once-white Nikes now the color of barn mice.

She walked down the long hallway then she leaned around Bella's doorway. What she saw disturbed her. Taking up a good eight square feet of wall space was the dark, imposing image of a castle, its jagged parapets jutting into the sky like jack-o'-lantern teeth. There are ghosts in the windows.

_God fucking shit! _Clarice thought.

The image had been drawn heavily in Sharpie, the permanent marker gang members prefer for marking their territory.

"What in God's name?"Clarice barked, startling her highly-focused daughter. In front of the rough-edged castle, Bella had laid clothes on the floor to simulate a black-water moat. On the cloth moat were bathtub ducks smudged with white face paint.

The girl didn't know what to say. She was surprised by her mother's sudden presence and her mother's sudden displeasure.

"Bella! This is insane."

"Mom! This is my art! _You're _the one who says artists should always be working at it."

"Not on the damn walls. Hell, I'd tell you to clean it up, but it isn't even possible." Unfortunately, parenting hasn't made Clarice's tongue any less sharp.

"I hate this!" Little Starling said. "You act like I'm the only bad one in this house."

"What on Earth does that mean?" Clarice's vision became alarmingly acute as she stared Bella down. She saw all her flaws.

"You don't ever get to tell me I'm doing a terrible job, Bella! I bust my ass for you. I kill myself for you."

"Don't then."

Clarice crouched rapidly, disbursing adrenaline. She yanked up T-shirts, a costume veil. Then she recognized one of her blouses.

"Bella, where'd you find this? You're digging through my dressers now?"

Bella shrugged and bit her lip.

"I don't know what a shrug means. You don't _know_ where you got it? Did it get here by magic?"

Then Clarice's mind ran without her permission. Out of the room, down the hall, into the master bedroom and to the corner where she'd tossed the blouse last night.

The spell over Clarice broke and tenderness replaced her antagonism.

"Come here, missy. Front and center."

She guided Bella to the stack of periodicals in the living room.

"You think _I'm_ a mess, don't you?"

Bella studied her mom's face, saw the hint of a smile.

"You're not a mess, mama."

"Come on. Give it to me straight."

Bella covered a grin with her pale hand. "Sometimes?"

Making a big show of it, Clarice nudged the bottommost magazine an inch toward the edge of the table. She feigned concern as the corner of the stack edged out over the lip.

Bella held her breath.

Then Clarice pushed the magazines all the way off. They hit the hardwood with a belligerent slap.

Bella looked amused and confused when her mother just stood there. "Shouldn't we, like, clean it up?"

Clarice wanted to know where Bella had first seen that black castle. They needed a change of scenery for the interview.

CHAPTER 2

If Jack Crawford had been alive when Bella was born, Clarice would have called him up. She would have asked if he thought it weird to name her daughter after Jack's deceased wife, a woman Clarice had never met. Jack wasn't alive, though.

One of Bella's favorite outings is The West Virginia Zoo in Kingwood. It is small, but she loves it.

Clarice began with question one as Bella patted the bristly back of a petting zoo goat.

"So that castle? Is it from your zombie bride movie?"

"No," Bella said in a hesitant, sing-song dyad.

"Isn't there one just like it?"

"_My _castle isn't in 'The Corpse Bride', mom."

"I actually said '_like_'. As in similar."

Seeing similarities, making connections. This is the heart of detective work. But most law enforcement officers are like ministers; trained to find the differences in things, especially in people.

"I know what 'like' means, _actually_!" Bella said.

The billy goat nipped at her dress and she couldn't help but giggle. "No-no, you. I'm not food."

Clarice remembered getting bucked off a goat once when she was young. Remembered her father scooping her up and brushing her off. She followed as Bella headed over to the sheep.

"So, hey," Clarice said, her tone softer now, "where _did_ you see it, since there's absolutely nothing like it in any movie you've ever seen?"

"I see that castle my dreams."

"Oh?"

Bella found the only black sheep. "How are you doing, mister? Isn't he cute, mama?"

"He is very cute."

Clarice let the lamb sniff her hand and Bella giggled. "Bella, do you ever see things when you're awake, things I don't see?"

"I don't know what you don't see."

"Good point."

Her line of questioning was informed by the Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory, a common test doctors use on patients. It asks everything from whether they're afraid of snakes to whether they think they're occasionally controlled by alien beings.

Bella nuzzled her cheek against the sheep's flank. It either didn't notice or didn't mind.

"Well, sometimes I do see things that I'm too shy to talk about."

"Why do you feel shy about them?"

"I don't want you to think I'm stupid, Mama. Or crazy."

"Baby. Come here." Clarice lightly squeezed the back of Stella's long neck and gave the top of her head a peck. She felt that was the best answer right now.

"How about here, Bella? Have you seen anything today?"

"No."

Bella kept her hand on the sheep but looked her mom in the eyes. She chose her words carefully.

"Once, yesterday, when I was a baby," she started. Clarice glanced around the petting zoo, pretending she wasn't hanging on every word. "You showed me that house, on our 'bacation'. The big, brick one where you lived after Grampa died."

"You remember that? The orphanage."

Clarice didn't know why she'd taken Bella there.

"The orphanage is where I saw angels, Mama."

"Pictures of them or-"

"Mom!"

"Right. Obviously. Uh, where'd you see these guys?"

"In that big tree, in the front yard."

Clarice knew the one, a Babylon Weeping Willow. It was beautiful but its wood was too brittle for Montana winters.

"Were they," she started, phrasing the question with mock gravitas then smiled as she said, "swinging all around like spider monkeys?"

Bella laughed out loud. It startled the sheep and he hustled over to his trough.

"Yeah, right! That's silly. Sorry, sheepie!"

"I see. I see. No swinging. What _were_ they doing, Doll?"

"Mama, they were humming."

_Humming angels? Holy hell. _Clarice found it disturbing and lovely to imagine.

"What did they look like?"

Bella answered before Clarice could offer any jokey stereotypes.

"Like thoughts, mama."

Then she asked to go to the monkey section. Clarice pictured the primates in their cages; their dull eyes and their tense muscles.

"What do you say we skip the monkeys this time?"

"Ah!"

"Honey. Monkeys throw stuff," Clarice said, "and they're way too close to human."

CHAPTER 3

The Starlings exited the petting zoo and Clarice led Bella toward a snack kiosk.

"So what other things do you see?" Clarice asked as they got in line.

"Sometimes people. Sometimes animals. They seem normal but, when you get close, they're like shadows. Or they're just gone."

Clarice's stomach dropped at the thought of her little girl living in a world populated by phantoms.

"Sounds spooky. Any other spooky stuff?"

"Promise you won't get mad, Mom?"

_How do you promise that? _

_Well, my Dear, you open your mouth and say:_

"I promise. Nothing's shocking, right?"

She squeezed Bella's hand and crouched down to her level.

Bella whispered, "I dream about blood."

Clarice cast a glance at the nearest adults. It didn't look like any of them had heard.

Bella went on. "In some of the dreams it's like a flood, coming down the street. Slower than water, a little bit slower. And it smells. Like my piggy tank, but way stronger."

Clarice scooped Bella up and stood. "Once it got high enough to come in the windows. But you carried me upstairs. We were all right. It hadn't learned to go that high."

Clarice felt tingly and emptied. She ground her foot into the dirt and found a little strength.

_How the hell does my little girl know that blood smells like copper?_ Then she thought, _Goddamn it, Clarice! Reserve fucking judgment_. _Keep your mouth shut and your mind open._

They got to the front of the line.

"What're you having, my belle?"

Bella pointed to a basket of puny, desaturated-looking fruit. "An orange?"

"What about all this amazing junk food? Starburst. Mounds. How 'bout we compromise and get an Orange Crush?"

"No thanks, mom. Oranges are healthy, right? And super sweet."

"Kids these days," she said to the cashier, a kid himself.

Clarice sat down beside Bella on a retaining wall and said, "What _is_ the world coming to?"

Then she opened her purse and took out her father's pocket knife; its blade tip had long since snapped off.

"Wait. Look," Bella said, as she dug her thumbnail into the orange's skin. "Smell."

"Did you just say 'look', 'smell'?"

"It's all the same thing."

Clarice closed her eyes and inhaled. The scent was exotic but homey.

When she opened her eyes, she caught a funny look from a mother toting her child in a front pack. For a moment, Clarice saw herself and her daughter from the other's point of view.

Those paint-smeared clothes. That broke-ass hillbilly knife. The paper-thin Nikes.

_No 'Mom of the Year Award' for you, Honey Child, _Clarice kidded herself._ You suck._

Bella brought her back. "Told you it smells good. Right?"

Clarice smiled and nodded. "Just like heaven, actually. Now gimme that thing!"

Clarice divided the orange and popped a slice in her mouth. It didn't taste as good as it smelled but she let out a rebel yell of delight.

"Lord have mercy!"

Most kids would have been mortified but Bella thought it was the right response. She smiled and gulped down two slices.

The baby-carrier mom shook her head as she walked away, the weight of judging heavy on her. Clarice plucked another slice from Bella's hand and bit half of it.

"Too much slices, Mom!"

"Just my standard corkage fee."

"I don't know what that means." Her tone was pert. The problem wasn't her own inexperience; it was her mom's insistence on mentioning pointless esotery, stuff no one could possibly know.

Clarice considered prying further into Bella's mind as they chewed in comfortable silence. She kept her mouth shut, though. Thought about cycles, about things coming back around again. About a child born of an unstable mother and a father some thought was the Devil himself. Clarice watched her daughter's round, dark eyes and wondered where things were going.

To hell in a hand basket?

Is that what the perfect mother with her elegantly-patterned Baby Bjorn thought after she'd scanned the two living Starlings for and deemed them irredeemably weird?

"So, my little artist," Clarice said, "What do you say we blow this place and get home?"

"But what about the mon-", Bella said.

"Don't we have an art project to finish?"

"You mean the castle?"

"Yeah."

Their voices get quieter as they walk out of earshot, toward their Mustang.

"So you know what they call baby swans?"

"Do they call them swannies?"

"Good guess, but they're are actually called cygnets."

They are too far away now to hear what Bella thinks about that.

TRIVIA QUESTIONS

(Email answers to mmintz )

Clarice calls Bella's shadow people visions "spooky". Who once asked Clarice if she spooks easy?

What "embarrassing truth" was Clarice reminded of when she thought of the monkey section of the zoo?

Clarice offers Bella a soda instead of a real orange. Who once handed Clarice an Orange Crush? What other junk food did she give Clarice that is mentioned here?

Who would Clarice been reminded of when she saw the mother with her child in a front carrier?

Who did young Hannibal once meet underneath a painting of Judith beheading Holofernes?

Clarice teases Bella about telling her to look at a smell but Bella replies, "It's all the same thing." What does that say about how Bella perceives the world?

Who is Bella's father? Are you sure about that?

6


End file.
